GANG BUSTER

Paul Galloway, Tribune Staff WriterCHICAGO TRIBUNE

In Chicago on behalf of the organization he founded to rehabilitate street gang members, Jim Brown emerges slowly, deliberately from a black Oldsmobile sedan and walks almost haltingly toward the entrance of a down-at-the-heels high-rise in the Ida B. Wells public housing project on the South Side.

If you're old enough to have watched him play pro football for the Cleveland Browns, you're reminded of how he would arise after having been tackled and head toward the huddle. He was strikingly unhurried and at times seemed quite possibly in some sort of agony.

Then on the next play-surprise!-he might burst through the line with boggling ferocity, accelerate suddenly and score. Bam. Just like that.

Brown says the slow-motion stuff between plays was calculated to conserve stamina, avoid muscle pulls and conceal injuries from his opponent.

Almost three decades away from the game, he moves the same way.

And people still notice. A few years ago, a Washington Post reporter who was profiling him wondered if he were hurt or his boots pinched. "I just walk funny," he said.

On this sunny Friday afternoon, however, it turns out that something really is bothering Brown, something that comes from being 58 and a bit out of shape.

"I'm stiff," he confides. "I played basketball a couple of days ago for the first time in two years. Arsenio Hall got a game up at a gym in the Valley"-he means the San Fernando Valley near his home in the Hollywood Hills-"and I'm feeling it."

He has come to this building at 3833 S. Langley Ave. to visit the Chicago office of his organization, Amer-I-Can, which just completed a pilot program under the sponsorship of the Chicago Housing Authority.

A cluster of young children playing near the entrance of the building see Brown and run toward him, squealing and chattering.

Two hours earlier, when he had arrived at Tribune Tower for an interview, he'd had a similar, if more subdued, effect; instead of squeals and chatter, he'd received guarded double-takes and the most subtle forms of adult gawking.

The children at the Wells building don't know who he is, but they obviously sense he's somebody special, this large, imposing, well-dressed man who carries himself with such majesty.

Brown is attired in a navy-blue, double-breasted suit, white shirt, patterned tie. He also wears a cap in the red, black and green of the African-American national flag.

He's 6-foot-2 and perhaps 20 pounds over his playing weight of 228, the result of having abandoned his daily workouts over the past 18 months to concentrate fully on Amer-I-Can.

Did he ever. He may be the best running back in history; even some Walter Payton fans might agree with that.

Willie, a little weak on his football lore, draws a blank, so Brown takes another tack.

"Did you see that movie `I'm Gonna Git You Sucka'?" That's a 1988 comedy and Brown's 25th film.

Willie's eyes widen.

"I was the guy who had that big, sore toe," Brown says.

"Yeah! I seen you. You said, `Ohhh, my toe!' "

"That's right," Brown says.

Foreshadowing Michael Jordan, Brown retired in 1966 after nine seasons (the length of Jordan's NBA tenure, by the way) to be a movie actor. The sports world was stunned; he was 30, unhurt and at the top of his skills.

"You know karate?" Willie asks.

Later in the day, Brown will address the graduation of the first 22 young people to complete Amer-I-Can's 90-hour course.

The course is designed to develop self-confidence and self-respect, control emotions and think through problems and make decisions logically, manage finances, communicate clearly, find and maintain employment and, finally, teach others these lessons. The three instructors here are former Chicago gang members Philip Laury, Mitchell Johnson and Kevin Thomas, who calls himself Brother Omar.

Brown says he chose the organization's name to emphasize his patriotism and his belief in capitalism.

"I'm pro-American," he says. "I wanted to be adamant about it. A lot of the gang-bangers and convicts we work with put America down, act like it doesn't count. Some of them talk about overthrowing `the system.' You can't. It's too strong. To survive, they must learn to participate.

"This is a great country. We've got to make it better. The `I-Can' is the message that we have the ability to change our way of thinking and acting."

If he sounds like a flag-waving conservative, it's because he is. In 1968, he organized the Black Economic Union to raise venture capital for black businesses. GOP presidential aspirant and former quarterback Jack Kemp is a friend.

Brown also admires Minister Louis Farrakhan and his Nation of Islam.

"If I say that, people say you're a hater," he says. "My support of them has nothing to do with Farrakhan's speeches. I'm into actions. I see no violence or second agendas or subversive actions from them. They've done fantastic things in turning ex-convicts and drug addicts around. They preach good principles-hard work, responsibility, cleanliness, thrift.

"I have my own principles," he continues. "I'm for equality and against separatism and racism. My home is open to all people. It always has been. It doesn't matter what gender or age or race."

Or gang affiliation. In 1990, he began opening his home to meetings between members of the Crips and Bloods, the two dominant and warring gangs of the Los Angeles area.

Gangs in his house

The first parley was arranged by Farrakhan after his appearances in Los Angeles in late 1989 and early 1990 at which he called for an end to gang violence.

After Farrakhan departed, the meetings continued.

"They felt a different atmosphere at my home," Brown says. "They could go there and not feel threatened to sit with their enemies."

On occasion, he says, he was host to as many 500 gang members.

And the neighbors didn't object. "My house is on top of a hill," he says. "It's remote. Nobody said anything." Besides, who wants to get in a beef with Jim Brown?

As he listened, he says, he realized that most gang members wanted to change their lives. "We needed a structure to turn the words into action," he says. "So I started Amer-I-Can.

"If we're going to do anything about crime and violence, gangs are the key," Brown says. "They contribute to the chaos like nobody else. They train little kids to become predators like them. Changing just one of these individuals means lives are saved, money is saved, families and children are treated better."

The reach would extend to prison. "Law enforcement says once a guy gets a certain age, lock him up, he can't be changed. But a lot of gang leaders run the gangs from prison. You've got to change them too."

Good things happened. "One of our kids negotiated a truce between the Crips and Bloods at four housing projects in Watts," Brown says. "Another kid wrote the peace document."

"It's lasted two years, which is longer than any agreements in Bosnia and Somalia," says Adrien Wing, a law professor at the University of Iowa, who has written about the Watts ceasefire.

The Brown blueprint

Brown consulted with experts, read widely and put together "a curriculum" of "life-management and job skills."

This instructional program is now taught in eight states, not only to the original targets-gang members and prison inmates-but also to police officers, prison guards and in high schools and housing projects.

The Chicago graduates are young people who reside in the Robert Taylor Homes and Rockwell Gardens. Carol Adams, director of CHA resident programs, says Amer-I-Can may be expanded to other sites.

Brown was accompanied to Chicago by a top aide, Luther Johnson, whose nickname is Rockhead. Johnson, 34, 5-foot-11 and 255 pounds, is a former Crip and an Amer-I-Can success story, although his initial distrust of Brown took weeks to recede.

"I took 60 Crips to his house, but I walked out," he says. "I thought he was like any celebrity, trying to use people.

"He called me over and over again. I'd hang up on him. He kept calling, from Chicago and Denver and Ohio. It didn't make no sense that this man was interested in me. I started listening. Pretty soon I was talking to him three hours at a time.

"He asked me if I was brilliant, and I said yeah, and he said prove it. He told me to read his manual about managing your life. I liked it. I never respected any adult until Jim Brown. He's the only person besides my daughter I've ever said I loved dearly."

Johnson has served 17 years in juvenile facilities or prison, 10 at Folsom state prison in California. "Eight were in the hole-solitary confinement," Johnson says. "I was a cold, harsh individual."

Brown assigned Johnson to develop the program in Oregon. Miracle of miracles, he became pals with cops. "Lt. Col. Dean Renfrow is a dear, good friend," he says. "He's been trying to get me to live in Oregon."

Speaking to the Senate

Last month, Brown, Johnson, Wing and Renfrow, of the Oregon State Police, went to Washington to testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Justice, where they urged that a pending crime bill should put more money into training provided by groups like Amer-I-Can than in prisons.

Fifteen months ago, Johnson, returning to his old haunts, was shot 11 times by someone bent on punishing his defection from the gang. "Rockhead knows who did it but he did not retaliate," Brown says.

Johnson credits the training with smothering his desire for revenge.

Brown admits that he himself could have used some restraint in the past. He has been charged with assault against women on at least three occasions, the most recent in 1986; in each case, charges were dropped after investigation or withdrawal of the complaint.

"Over the years I got in a lot of trouble," Brown says. "Some I caused, some I didn't. I've had times when I did not control myself. I've learned."

In "Out of Bounds," his 1989 memoir, he's also forthright about his voracious appetite for women and sex with multiple partners.

He also confesses to having slapped women. "I regret those times," he wrote. "I should have been more in control of myself, stronger, more adult."

The Washington Post writer concluded he was "a combination radical black militant, sexual libertine and traditional Republican capitalist." A public-relations release for Amer-I-Can described him as a humanitarian and activist.

He may be all those things, plus something of a preacher as well.

At the graduation ceremonies at Northeastern Illinois University's Center for Urban Studies, 700 E. Oakwood Blvd., he tells the audience:

"If there's anybody in this room that doesn't want to be loved by somebody, stand up. I've said that at San Quentin and Folsom and all the prisons we've been in, and not one person stood up.

"What makes Amer-I-Can different is we can work with these people and get them to change themselves. And I can go to any of these gang people in their territory with no fear. Why? Because they know I care. . . .

"I have no life to live beyond them. I'm not religious, but I am spiritual, and I try to know something about the Bible.

"I know that Jesus, when he was on Earth, walked among the people. Not among the elite, the most well-educated or the wealthy.

"He walked among those who didn't have anything. No money, reputation, nothing. I don't worry about being harmed by a gang-banger. He knows I love him.

"We have to understand and love other people. If you cannot love yourself, you cannot love anybody else, and therefore, you cannot bring about change. If you feel powerful enough, you have the ability to love your enemies. Each one here reach out to people. Use your intelligence and your love."